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Sometime ago I interviewed for a big and well known MNC … I thought that the discussions went pretty well but after a few days got a callback but this time for a different group, that is, restart of the process 😦 . After some days another call and same story. “The last discussion went pretty well but unfortunately we could not hire you since we got an internal candidate. It is our company policy to give priority to internal candidates.”

After a few such good interviews but bad experiences I asked the HR representative for a frank opinion about whether I had a fair shot at the job or was I making up for numbers ( do they have a target of ‘n’ interviewees per position) . The answer was an expected ” we have fair hiring practices ” etc. But I didn’t get anymore calls.

Why do people do such things? Why force a candidate to take a day off to interview when you know beforehand that you are fulfilling some shortsighted HR policy.

N.R.Narayana Murthy – the god father of Infosys has in recently requested for a smaller airport near Electronic City since the current airport at Devanahalli is very far from Electronic City and the commute is killing. He has earlier also made statements like “… imagine if somebody who lives in Jayanagar wants to take a flight …”. He is concerned about his people’s troubles in taking a flight – commendable. The Infosys campus is out of the city at Electronic City and people from all over the city commute upto 2 hrs one way to reach office. The commute to office is daily, and the commute to airport is occasional, even for the most frequent travelers. Why does Mr.NRN need a huge campus outside the city with a golf course, swimming pool, etc., when his slaves employees who travel for looong hours every day don’t even have a realistic chance of using these facilities. Why doesn’t he have tall skyscrapers in the middle of the city with reasonable access to all parts on Bangalore – ofcourse this may not have golf course … but the rank and file won’t care. Is Infosys in the real estate business or software business? NRN simply does’nt care about the commuting owes, low quality of life, inability to have even a half an hour of quality time with family on a average week days, etc., all problems of his long commuting employees. Azim Premji – (almost) owner of Wipro in an interview in the late ‘90s announced that some taxes should waived on corporate because the said companies when they operate out of Bangalore employ sooo many engineers and all the engineers pay income tax. At that time I am guessing that the average engineers salary at Wipro was about Rs.20,000/- and they would take home about 15-18 thousand after tax. And since most of Wipro’s income was Premji’s a waiver on tax on Wipro would mostly mean that Premji, being the de facto owner, got a tax waiver. So in essence he was campaigning for his employees who earned a measly twenty thousand should pay tax and he should not when he makes about twenty thousand thousand!!! All your employees love you too.

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One of my ex-colleagues recently told me that he was working on bug parity. It turns out that bug parity has a meaning is the software world. You have a system that has some bugs. The customer has written a lot of scripts or wrapper software that takes into account the said bugs. Now if the bugs are fixed then the customer written code will no longer work because the bugs are absent. So, in order to sell new equipment to the customer the vendor will work towards re-introducing the bugs so that the customer does not have to tweak his code!!!